engleski

Social skills of medical teachers: Do we need to take them in account?

Social skills can be defined as a set of social behaviors that can produce a favorable effect in another person, in the case of medical education, changes of learner's behavior. As educational psychologists use to say, social skills of teachers are very important. We conducted a small research to see how socially skillful/competent are teachers in two Croatian medical schools, Rijeka and Zagreb. It was a 16-items, 5-point Likert scale questionnaire (minimum 16, maximum 80 points). The items measured social skills such as: persistence, certainty and self-confidence, approval, emphasis, empathy, cooperation and coordination, and capacity of caring for and adaptability to the person or situation. Fifty teachers participated, 29 from Rijeka, 22 male, 41.7 average age, 27 clinical, 16 preclinical and 6 public health and primary care. They exhibited rather high level of social skills (mean = 61.7 ± 7.2). But we identified 3 teachers with less than 48 and 3 less than 52 points, which could be estimated as poor social skills. It is interesting that 10 teachers did not show any empathy. Although, the questionnaire should be evaluated and standardized, the question still remains: Do we need to evaluate/work on the improvement of social skills of medical teachers?

social skills; medical education; medical teacher; moral character

nije evidentirano